I appreciate rftctlmmt’s post Sacheen Littlefeather gets an apology from The Academy. 50 years later. The treatment she got at the Oscars in 1973 while a couple of hundred of us were encamped at the siege of Wounded Knee being shot at by federal marshals was deplorable. Even though it took 50 years, the Academy’s apology to her is welcome.
But the Academy and Hollywood in general should apologize for a long history of twisted, lying films about American Indians, few of which actually included Native actors. And while there have been a dozen or so better films about Natives since LIttlefeather was heckled and booed on the stage at the Oscars a half-century ago, with rare exceptions, movies made then and more recently are brimful of stereotypes and slanders.
But omission is one of the greatest sins. For instance, never has there been a movie about the California genocide of American Indians 1850-1874. And movies about modern Indians, or ones including a Native as just another character, remain rare. The exceptions are a few independent films made by Natives, or with major Native input. One of those is the delightful comedy Reservation Dogs, Season 1 on Prime Video, Season 2 now underway at Hulu.
Schools in California still do a rotten job of teaching students about the history of American Indians in the state. While children here have been taught for decades a distorted view about the Spanish missions (which killed thousands of Natives via overwork in a system that amounted to a form of non-chattel slavery), few get informed of the genocide after California became a state. In 1850, the governor established what eventually became a $5 bounty on Native scalps—men, women, children. Thousands were murdered, by official militias and vigilantes alike. Although no scalp bounties were paid after 1874, the bounty remained on the books until 1911. Also, Natives could be pressed into forced labor on a whim. To escape all this, many Natives blended into the Latino population which, though oppressed, weren’t being murdered via government policy. Those people lost their culture, their language, their religion, and their tribal ties.
Surely, there is fodder for several good films to be made about that, both historical and modern.
Here are links to lengthy pieces I wrote in 2008 about the history of the depiction of American Indians in film (until quite recently, almost none of the actors doing the depicting were Native).
Friday Night at the Movies: Sidekicks and Savages (Part I)
Friday Night at the Movies: Sidekicks and Savages, Part II
An excerpt from Part I:
Rabbit-Proof Fence is my favorite big-screen movie of American Indians.
But that’s an Australian movie, you say? Yep. The best film of American Indians is a Down Under 2002 movie about aboriginals without a loin-cloth, smear of war paint or drop of firewater in sight. It’s the story of three young mixed-race girls who find their way home after being ripped away from their parents in 1931 by the government and trained to focus on their "white side" so they can become somebody’s servants. A few critics have complained that this based-on-a-true-story movie goes overboard in demonizing the main white character (Kenneth Branagh) and depicting most other whites of the era as deeply bigoted, morally uncourageous paternalists. What could the director have been thinking?
The American version of Rabbit-Proof Fence has been out there for the telling ever since Thomas Edison showed his "movie" Hopi Snake Dance at the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago in 1893 on the brand-new kinetoscope his staff had developed. It’s the story of how American Indian children were torn from their customs, religions, languages, tribes and parents by demons and paternalists who saw cultural genocide as the proper modern alternative to the centuries-old physical genocide that had become no longer an acceptable course of action. But of all the hundreds of movie Westerns depicting Indians, this story has failed to generate excitement among four or five generations of movie-makers. Instead, the Hollywood Indian has prevailed.
As Ted Jojola, an Isleta Pueblo Indian and associate professor at the University of New Mexico, wrote in his 1998 essay, "Absurd Reality II: Hollywood Goes to the Indians," Edison’s choice presented a stereotypical view of American Indians that would ...
"...persist into contemporary times. Its longevity though, is explained by the persistence of myth and symbol. The Indian became a genuine American symbol whose distorted origins are attributed to the folklore of Christopher Columbus when he ‘discovered’ the ‘New World.’ Since then the film industry, or Hollywood, has never allowed Native America to forget it. The Hollywood Indian is a mythological being who exists nowhere but within the fertile imaginations of its movie actors, producers and directors. The preponderance of such movie images have reduced native people to ignoble stereotypes."
It should not go without mentioning that Frederick Jackson Turner presented his The Significance of the Frontier in American History" in Chicago the same year as Edison’s movie. Turner’s acclaimed thesis was that the frontier had shaped America and the American character, but that it had closed in 1890, that being, not coincidentally, the year the 7th Cavalry got revenge for Custer by slaughtering 300 or so Lakotas at Wounded Knee Creek. While Turner’s thesis has subsequently been deeply critiqued, it held sway among academics and others for a century and still resonates for some today.
What this has meant for the movies is the same as you see in most school textbooks: The end of the frontier marks the end of the Indian. With few exceptions – and none of them even close to the epic films that reinforced the dime-novel, wild-west-show image of Indians that was well-formed before the turn of the 20th Century – most movies about or including Indians have been displays of racism and ahistoricity. They have performed a cultural genocide no different, but a great deal more widespread, than the Indian boarding schools of America which started long before the whitification schools of Australia were pressed into service. The best of these movies, however, have been finely crafted, deeply entertaining and gorgeously photographed productions, enjoyable for all kinds of reasons if only you can keep yourself from retching during certain segments. [...]
While you’re waiting for me to change reels, let me recommend six books on the subject of Indians in film that are part of my library.
The White Man’s Indian (1977) by Robert F. Berkhofer
Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film. (1998) edited by Peter Rollins and John E. O’Connor. In the foreward, the late ethnographer Wilcomb E. Washburn writes:
Critics can easily find ... incorrect and anomalous details in any number of Indian films. Others will apply questionable abstractions, such as "collective wish fulfillment patterns" in interpreting Indian films. Still others will use the past to comment on the present (for example, Soldier Blue or Little Big Man which allude to the Vietnam War). Few will agree on what films truly represent the American Indian, but no one should be deterred from debating the question. The "historical reality" – if one can accept the concept at all – will always remain elusive, speculative, and controversial.
The whole anthology is terrific, but especially Ted Jojola’s essay, "Absurd Reality II: Hollywood Goes to the Indians"; Ken Nolley’s essay, "The Representation of Conquest: John Ford and the Hollywood Indian"; James Sandos and Larry Burgess’ "The Hollywood Indian vs. Native Americans: Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here"; and Amanda J. Cobb’s "This Is What It Means to Say Smoke Signals. If you only read one book on Indians in film, this would be a good one.
Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians (1998) by Ward Churchill. I’ve had massive personal, professional and ideological differences with Ward Churchill over the years, but this book of his is worth the read.
The Book Of Westerns (1996), edited by Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye, especially the essay by Richard Maltby titled "A Better Sense of History: John Ford and the Indians"
Wiping the War Paint Off the Lens: Native American Film and Video (2001) by Beverly R. Singer and Robert Warrior
Making the White Man's Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies (2005) by Angela Aleiss.
Moviemakers could reinforce that apology to Littlefeather with positive, truthful films about American Indians in all our diversity, the complexities of our multiple cultures and tribal identities, with an emphasis on us as human beings.